Old Masters: After 80, some people don't retire. They reign - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/23/magazine/old-masters-at-top-of-their-game.html <comment><USER2> I liked Woody Allen's answer to the question why he was still working in his late seventies:

 _You know in a mental institution they sometimes give a person some clay or some basket weaving? It's the therapy of moviemaking that has been good in my life. If you don't work, it's unhealthy—for me, particularly unhealthy. I could sit here suffering from morbid introspection, ruing my mortality, being anxious. But it's very therapeutic to get up and think, Can I get this actor; does my third act work? All these solvable problems that are delightful puzzles, as opposed to the great puzzles of life that are unsolvable, or that have very bad solutions. So I get pleasure from doing this. It's my version of basket weaving._

<comment><USER3> >> If you don't work, it's unhealthy

This isn't just true for old people or mental unhealthy but for everybody. Having no troubles in life can become the biggest trouble of your life. If you are involved in some work, you have some troubles, or busy solving some problems a great deal of smaller problems in life just come and go without you giving a bid deal about it. If you have nothing to do, you will pick faults every single thing, you may pick fights with family members on sorts of silly issues. And things really get ugly from there.

And most importantly lets not forget working is one of the best ways to network with people, meet them, share your stories- this ensures a lot of your stress and anxiety gets a means to be vented out. Else alone, every things builds up in a pressure cookers and bursts real ugly some day.

<comment><USER4> Since that line of reason (which is a good one!) tends to be brought up when it comes to basic income, or "end of the age of scarcity" discussions, let me just add to this:

None of this depends on the current social contract of money seeking work (employment, contractors, ...).

It's perfectly possible to do meaningful work with meaningful social interactions when no money is changing hands and no threat of starvation is looming over people.

<comment><USER5> Wait, isn't that self-evident?

<comment><USER6> Not to the ardent capitalist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am currently reading _" Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity"_ [0].

The author starts with the observation that in the world of fine art, it seems that the artists who encountered great success are divided into 2 broad groups: the ones who had a clear vision (often groundbreaking) of what they wanted to accomplish, did it while they were young, peaking early (Young Geniuses); and the ones whose approach was more iterative, built upon theory and learning, who never stopped improving over their lifetime, and whose vision was established over decades (Old Masters).

To support this thesis, he looks at concrete data: for example, for the artists whose paintings sold for the most money, at what age did they paint the works which would later sell for the most? Or, to use an alternative method of approximating "success" \- for the works that are most often included in art textbooks, at what age were they painted by their authors? [1] He goes over several measures of "success" in this way, and the data maps pretty well with the commonly accepted wisdom for each artist (e.g. Picasso peaked early, and his later works are nowhere as remembered as his earlier stuff, while Cézanne took a lifetime to build his approach and vision).

He then looks into what those artists had to say about their processes, and how that relates to those findings; and he then explores this thesis beyond just the world of fine art.

It's a fairly dense read - especially if, like me, you have very little knowledge of fine art (in which case I recommend looking up the works as you read the book, even if it doubles your reading time) - but it's extremely enlightening. Highly recommended.

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/Old-Masters-Young-Geniuses- Creativity/...](http://www.amazon.com/Old-Masters-Young-Geniuses- Creativity/dp/0691133808/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&qid=1414120533&sr=8-11&keywords=old+masters)

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/YmexHi8.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/YmexHi8.jpg)

<comment><USER8> There's probably no big mystery behind this. For most folks the 30's would be when their number of dependent offspring capable of bipedal motion peaked.

<comment><USER9> As a non-native english speaker, I am not sure I get it. Do you mean they do less things in their 30's because they have children to take care of?

<comment><USER10> Yes, that's what he means

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The author of this article, Lewis Lapham [1], is himself quite accomplished at 79, and founded the magazine, _Lapham 's Quarterly_ [2], which might appeal to some HN readers.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_H._Lapham](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_H._Lapham)

[2]: [http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/](http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/)

<comment><USER12> It's a testament to his thesis on Old Masters and Second Acts that you cite his founding of _Lapham 's Quarterly_ instead of him being the editor of _Harper 's_ for almost forty years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer died working, at the age of 104 years. 2 years before his death he was visited by a Brazilian journalist, for an interview. After he knew the journalist was in his late 50s he commented:

"Oh, so young! You got your whole life in front of you!"

</comment><comment><USER14> The article is missing Ephraim Engleman, who is still a practicing medical doctor and researcher at 103 at UCSF Medical Center: [http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Dr-Ephraim- Engle...](http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Dr-Ephraim-Engleman- is-102-and-has-no-plans-to-5285486.php)

If you are doing what you love or work that is important, why retire?

<comment><USER15> It appears his wife is alive and well at 98. Happily married for 72 years! A year longer than the average global lifespan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Don't fool yourself, these people are amazing, but hey are outliers. While i understand that many people here aspire to be like this and you should, realistically speaking these people have been very lucky. Most people 80+ either have trouble walking, hearing, seeing, thinking (or any combination combined). It's longer than the average lifespan, so that these people can still do their work in a meaningful way is a godsend. Sure, you can do a lot with a healthy lifestyle, but still there are limits to your genes, or life could take unexpected turns every second. My uncle, 62 years old, CEO of a bank, who was always healthy and fit just had a stroke and is now wheelchair bound and does not know which year it is. Meanwhile, his brother (my dad), has been smoking his whole life and not exercised for decades but is still fine. he probably won't get to 80 though, and he knows that.

</comment><comment><USER17> I found this study to be interesting, regarding retirement age.

[http://ftp.iza.org/dp5160.pdf](http://ftp.iza.org/dp5160.pdf)

> For males, we find that a reduction in the effective retirement age causes a > significant increase in the risk of premature death

> We do not find that earlier effective retirement increases the risk of > premature death for females, however

<comment><USER18> I have to initially suspect that this difference between the genders has at least something to do with the fact that often -- particularly in the eras of the currently elderly -- the "work" of a female extended well beyond the office and into the household. Retirement may end the office duties, but the household duties will continue.

<comment><USER19> I doubt that contributes, because it's not just limited to humans. Females of most species live longer than males.

<comment><USER20> he is suggesting it as an explanation for retirement contributing to premature death in men more than in women, not the difference in life expectancy in general.

<comment><USER21> It could be related to post-retirement activities.

Men, as a hypothetical, might take up drinking and fishing, leading to an increase in mortality caused by liver failure, cancer, what have you.

Women, again as a hypothetical, might take up other activities that don't increase mortality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Reminds me of the story Merlin Mann tells about the butcher who when asked what trick he uses to know that he picked up exactly a pound of meat responds "Be a butcher for 20 years".

<comment><USER23> That's kung fu, and it's extremely satisfying to cultivate it in everything you do. I've been inspired to learn how to do stuff like that since I saw a chef drop ingredients into a recipe without measuring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Dr. Jerry Cox is 89, leads his latest startup[1], remains a sr. cs professor @WashU[2], sold a company he co-founded (Growth Networks) for >$355M to Cisco in 2000, and is generally smart and inspiring. Also sat for a formal oral history focused on his contributions to biomedical computing[3].

[1] [http://blendics.com/team/](http://blendics.com/team/)

[2] [http://cse.wustl.edu/PEOPLE/Pages/cox.aspx](http://cse.wustl.edu/PEOPLE/Pages/cox.aspx)

[3] [http://beckerexhibits.wustl.edu/oral/transcripts/cox.html](http://beckerexhibits.wustl.edu/oral/transcripts/cox.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> >I'm guessing there is no point to asking when you plan on retiring?

>I'm going to retire in a box being carried out of my office.

Brilliant.

<comment><USER26> He sounds a little like the former president of the company I work for (President is higher than CEO over here).

He was extremely hardworking, wise and smart, he knew the business in and out, but he was pretty much set in his ways and did not delegate, and was hampering the company's growth (many of this kind of people try to keep their company manageable by themselves).

He ended up being overthrown by a brilliantly executed palace coup (by a sociopath, but I digress), but he would have stayed until his death if left to his own decision.

Actually, for some of the most driven workaholics, being retired is kind of a death sentence, it really does shorten their lives (most, being old, don't adapt to change well).

My father is still young, but I'm betting he's going to do the same (he is the head of a law firm), and I'm glad not to have followed his career, he's going to cast a shadow over his potential successors for decades.

<comment><USER27> My grandfather is cut from the same cloth, at 87 he still still farms and does hard physical labor. He's slowed down and is semi-retired but he golfs nearly every day when not working (carries his own bag for 18 holes). Retirement isn't an option for some people...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What, no props to our main man here? [http://cs.stanford.edu/~uno/](http://cs.stanford.edu/~uno/) [http://laughingsquid.com/jacob-appelbaum-donald-knuth- demons...](http://laughingsquid.com/jacob-appelbaum-donald-knuth-demonstrate- the-recursive-homeboys-principle/) All right, he isn't quite 80 _yet_ , but looking good so far...

</comment><comment><USER29> One Great example for above will be Jiri One: A Japanese Master chef for shushi, I would say if there is only one documentary you will see this month. Let it be this one: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiro_Dreams_of_Sushi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiro_Dreams_of_Sushi)

<comment><USER30> Highly recommended. Available on Netflix.

<comment><USER29> Will be glad to know , what you learnt from it?

<comment><USER31> I found Jiro's son to be the more interesting character. The way he talks about being raised in the shadow of a master and choosing to follow in his father's footsteps is touching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> One of my heroes is Fred Beckey. He's a lifelong climber, and is still climbing into his 90's.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Beckey](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Beckey)

[http://www.mountainproject.com/v/fred-beckey-90-years-old- cl...](http://www.mountainproject.com/v/fred-beckey-90-years-old-climbing-in- jtree/107955528)

<comment><USER33> I will add him to the list of my heroes, right next to Jack Lalanne, who was a fitness enthusiast and lived a healthy and active life till 96.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_LaLanne](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_LaLanne)

<comment><USER34> [http://www.elitefeet.com/the-legend-of-cliff- young](http://www.elitefeet.com/the-legend-of-cliff-young) might be of interest. (I think that take is only 80% accurate -- but it captures the drama of his most famous achievement (at age 61!) better than Wikipedia: [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Young_(athlete)](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Young_\(athlete\)) )

<comment><USER32> That's an incredible and inspiring story. Thanks for sharing, I had never heard of him before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I thought Robert Caro would belong on this list. He amazes me, having written over the course of five decades two seminal books, both of which earned Pulitzer prizes. But he's "only" 79.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Caro](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Caro)

</comment><comment><USER36> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Kahn](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Kahn)

Irving Kahn, still working on Wall Street at 108--and finding stocks to buy for the long run

</comment><comment><USER37> If you have been doing something all your life and you enjoy doing it why stop?

However, the question I have been struggling with lately has been: how do you pick up something new later on in life?

If you start to learn basket-weaving at 40, you are not going to be a great basket-weaver.

If you start programming at 40, you are not going to become Bill Joy or Fabrice Bellard, sorry. (counterexamples in any field welcome)

Your 10k hours count for much less at 40 than at 15. That guy(Danplan) who started golfing to become a Pro at 28 is slowly starting to find that out despite his progress.

So you have to pick your fights very carefully, if you are a chess master you can probably become a decent shogi or go player and vice versa.

If you have a solid foundation in math, you can probably do decent physics work at 40.

However, and this is what worries me, if your art in grade 5 was dismal, are you going to be able to get decent at 40?

That one lady in article sold her first painting at 89, but the question is whether she took up painting late in life or was that just a lucky fluke. (selling != enjoying painting)

<comment><USER21> I'm going to guess you're either around 20 and just don't know many people who took up new pursuits in their later years, or that you're late 50s and haven't seen peers put the same amount of effort they put in when they were in their 20s.

Most of the 15, 20 year olds I know who are _good_ at something are almost obsessive about it. It's not just that they're young, it's that they're really hard workers.

<comment><USER37> In fact I am neither, I am in my early 40s and thus my question.

I too was obsessive about certain things(programming, chess) at that age. My problem is that this is not enough anymore when you are older. Even if you have all the time in the world, you will not be able to improve as much as some 15 year old in a year of intense study. So it goes.

I do not want to get bad at something, I want to get decent at something that would help people be it basket-weaving, or teaching German philosophy from original German texts.

My pet theory for some time has been that in order to achieve something significant in some field, you must have done a lot of deliberate practice before reaching certain age.

So some talent, lots of hard work and age < 20(25) are necessary conditions. The age part has mostly been ignored, while hard work part has been emphasized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> My favourite examples are two woodworkers who I admire greatly, Sam Maloof and James Krenov. Maloof was still making his rockers at 94, maybe a bit slower but not much.

Krenov sadly lost much of his eyesight in his late 80s so stopped making cabinets. But he continued to make planes, because he could make them by feel.

</comment><comment><USER39> I loved the article.

One note: not all retirement is necessarily sitting in front of the tv waiting to die. My grandfather is 81, and he and his wife are very active RVers. They travel around the country, hike, go four wheeling in their jeep. He seems about as happy as the people in the article.

</comment><comment><USER40> Betty White's responses are fantastic. Her humor really shines through!

</comment><comment><USER41> Why is there no mention of Frank Lloyd Wright?

The man is one of the most celebrated architects in the history of the field, and he created his masterwork (Fallingwater) when he was 71. Furthermore, his output over the last 20 years of his life accounted for more than half of his lifetime output. He died while in the middle of creating the Guggenheim - simply did not stop.

Interestingly enough his life arc was quite similar to Steve Jobs.

</comment><comment><USER42> Beautiful photos, fascinating interview snippets. I love compelling narratives that remind us that life isn't over at 30.

</comment><comment><USER43> "I just love to work" \- Betty White.

Love this article. Be realistic. Recognize patterns. Love what do you do. Inspiring.

</comment><comment><USER44> I know we have skepticism over the 10k hours of practice theory, but I still kinda like it, at least in broad strokes.

And if there's going to be another "10x" level, these are probably them. 100k hours of effortful practice, at 2500 hours per year = 40 years. Crazy.

<comment><USER45> James Altucher had a great spin on it. He says that maybe it takes 10,000 hours to master something, but with only 1000 hours, you can get pretty good. And that only takes a year of fitting it in for 20 hours a week. Even 100 hours of practice at any particular skill will make you better at it than most people, and you can do that in like 2 hours a week for 6 months. If you feel like mastering it after that, go for it, but if you frame it as "I can have a new skill after about 6 months of practice" instead of "I can be a master in 10 years of super hard work", you're a lot more likely to try it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'm surprised no one has considered how older aged workers fit in the software engineering industry. From my experience it seems like the older you get, the less viable you are.

<comment><USER35> Your experience is that you are less viable as time marches on? Or you perceive older people to be so?

Where I worked the "10x" engineers (who are legendary) are among the eldest.

<comment><USER47> I'm not even 30 and I feel like my skills are in decline. I can cover it up with experience - I know the libraries and tools and how to use them, and that can make you 100x faster. But I'm getting set in my ways after seeing what does and doesn't work so many times, and I'm losing the ability to just do something without thinking it through.

<comment><USER48> :)

You are becoming more valuable (in the sense of being able to deliver more absolute value). But you are becoming less of a commodity, which means employers are also becoming less of a commodity for you.

To prepare for the future, you need to look into marketing yourself "wholesale" (that is, sell completed projects rather then into a team), and/or establish a network of people who care about fundamentals and not the latest hotness.

I turned down a hadoop job awhile ago, because it was hurting me to do things so stupidly. (I managed to do the same thing on C at 1/10 of the time on one machine as the project did on 10 machines using Hadoop, but they insisted that "hadoop is the thing"). If I was hungry for food, I might just deal with these pains. I'm obviously less employable right now than I was in my 20s when I was happy to use any stupid technology - but I'm happier for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> " _So how do you stay in shape?_

" _I have a two-story house and a very bad memory, so I'm up and down those stairs all the time. That's my exercise._ "

I love Betty White.

</comment><comment><USER50> I feel sorry for the 80 year old manual workers. I would expect it's harder for them...

</comment><comment><USER51> I am 42 and I am retired - and loving it. It means I have all the time in the world for doing things I really like, instead of staring at stock market charts all day long.

mikaelsyding.com

</comment><comment><USER52> Unfortunately, writing programs isn't an occupation for old people.

EDIT: To be more precise, I cannot image that I will write a program after my retirement. To me, writing ephemeral programs is the opposite of the artful activities described in the article.

<comment><USER53> Surpising to see discrimination expressed so blatantly. Luckily it's illegal in at least US[1], UK[2], etc etc.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_Discrimination_in_Employmen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_Discrimination_in_Employment_Act_of_1967)

[2] [http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/private-and-public- sector...](http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/private-and-public-sector- guidance/guidance-all/protected-characteristics)

<comment><USER54> Unluckily those laws are basically unenforceable and age discrimination in software development is rampant.</comment></comment></comment>


With beetroot juice before exercise, aging brains look 'younger' - <AUTHOR> http://exactlyscience.com/archives/12076.html <comment><USER2> Blogspam of

[http://news.wfu.edu/2017/04/19/beetroot-juice-exercise- aging...](http://news.wfu.edu/2017/04/19/beetroot-juice-exercise-aging-brains- look-younger/)

with author credit (Alicia Roberts) stripped out.</comment>


Ask HN: Are there successfull, ajax-heavy SaaS Apps by small teams?  - <AUTHOR>

I use a number of SaaS platforms daily - none of them very ajax heavy (no single page app type things) other then gmail -- which certainly is not maintained by a 'small' team.
My experience has always been that ajax-heavy apps are more difficult to maintain, and take more developer hour to build and add features to. Maybe I'm doing it wrong.
Does anyone have any examples of successful, heavily ajax-based SaaS apps that are built and maintained by small teams? <comment><USER2> You should check out ExtJS, which has been put to stunning use by Synology in their range of network attached storage products.</comment>


Question time: my life as a quiz obsessive - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/jan/28/question-time-my-life-as-a-quiz-obsessive <comment><USER2> I sometimes watch the German version of "The Chase" [0]. I am often completely flabbergasted by the quiz competency of the Chaser. They regularly know the answer to questions which are so outlandish that there is no way you can explain their success only with intelligence or talent. Even if you had absolute memory or an IQ of > 200, there is just no way you would've ever been _exposed_ to the correct answer of some of these questions.

So paragraphs like these come as a relieve to me:

> Gibson has built himself software into which he keys facts that he comes > across; on some days, he will add as many as 100 facts to his database, > culled from books, TV or his perusal of The Times over breakfast. If he is > driving and he hears something compelling on the radio, he will pull over > and scribble it down in the notebook he always carries with him. He sets > time aside for revision. He may decide, next week, that it's been too long > since he brushed up on the Vietnam war, so he will call up the file and > study it.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(British_game_show)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_\(British_game_show\))

</comment><comment><USER3> >>> European quizzes grew more capacious as well. "I've looked in old quiz books, and the questions are dreadful, frankly," Jack Waley-Cohen, one of the question editors for the BBC show Only Connect, told me. "There was an assumption that everybody knew the same things." Now, quizmasters don't ever ask who the chancellor of the exchequer was in 1973, he said. "For one, someone who is an expert in television or music has an opportunity to demonstrate it, because there are questions on that. But also, the questions I like don't test absolute knowledge. They test lateral thinking, and your ability to access knowledge."

I'm sure there are plenty of Only Connect fans here (and probably some contestants too). If you've never seen it, it's well worth a watch. Any question I manage to answer is a massive outlier, but frequently enough I'm left thinking "I Should have seen that".

<comment><USER4> I still hold those moments where I had the answer to a five-pointer question very dear to my heart.

It's very curious how some questions are so British that I can't even relate to the explanation after the fact, but others (especially punny questions) are probably more front-of-mind to ESL speakers.

<comment><USER3> So memorable. My greatest triumph being "Extra special". (Spoiler: I count myself in the vanishing small Only Connect segment that both shops at ASDA and buys the premium range)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One place the information age has failed us so far is with trivia/quiz questions. There are surprisingly few open repositories of quality questions.

There is the Open Trivia DB, which isn't really open but exposes a free API. It's also a bit heavy on video/computer game questions for my tastes and doesn't support multiple categories per API request. It's either all categories or one.

I like to play trivia games on my phone on transit, etc. All I could find was crap, often full of ads. So I made one, a couple years ago. It's kinda crap too, so now I'm making another.

The back end uses the open trivia DB, but supports multiple categories per game. I'm currently caching the questions in to a DB. When I have them all, I will be able to improve the initial load times, which is currently 1-2 seconds per category selected at the beginning of each game. It won't scale well until then. I should be posting a Show HN in the near future.

Anybody know of any other trivia DB's out there? I found a dead github repo. There is a fair bit but it is really rough. There should be some from IRC trivia bots from back in the day, but I haven't found them. Commercial ones are out, as there will be no ads, tracking or monetization of any kind. Just a simple & light trivia mobile-friendly web app.</comment>


Ask YC: Why is everyone so negative about patents? - <AUTHOR>

It appears that everyone  in the tech and startup industries have a very negative attitude towards patents, why is this?
As I see it patents are nothing but good for startups. If you have one you have some sort of defense against being run over by others stealing your unique technology. And noone sues a startup based on patent infringement knowing that there is probably not a lot of money to be made if the case is won.
Besides VC's love patents.
So why exactly are patents so evil? <comment><USER2> Probably the best argument against software patents is the way they are implemented. The patent office is doing a horrible job at determining which patents to grant.

Just look at Amazon's one click patent, or at the thousands of patents granted to patent trolls for things like "lists of media that are customized to a specific user". I kid you not, the last company I worked at was being sued for presenting users with song recommendations because it violated a patent on "customized lists".

The other major issue I see is that software companies don't care about patents. Very few patents are enforced by large companies, because its not worth it. Not to mention, you can't do basically anything anymore without infringing on someone's patent. They've become a sort of mutually assured destruction mechanism that companies build up with the pretext of being able to counter sue anyone who sues them.

<comment><USER3> _The patent office is doing a horrible job at determining which patents to grant._

Absolutely. I've seen lots of good software patents -- patents which are inventive, useful, and benefit the world by being published. The patent which covers rsync is a perfect example -- anything which is worth half of a PhD thesis when it is rediscovered a few years later certainly qualifies as "novel" in my opinion.

I've also seen a lot of very bad patents -- patents which cover "inventions" which were already well known in the field, patents which take a well- understood practice and add a formulaic "over the internet", patents which are written in such a manner as to not actually disclose anything about the invention being patented, et cetera.

The patent system needs to be reformed so as to stop granting so many bad patents; but I absolutely believe that software patents could be a net positive if they were implemented properly.

<comment><USER4> "The patent office is doing a horrible job at determining which patents to grant."

This could also be because, as Charles Duell, the head of the Patent Office pointed out at the end of the 19th century, "Everything that can be invented has been invented."

...

Okay, so the internet is now telling my that that's probably apocryphal, (<http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/22779.html>)but it still makes for an amusing quote. And I'm not one to let reality get in the way of humor. :-P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In areas where patents are the norm (not web 2.0), they have dramatically raised the cost of doing the business.

Also, on the topic of patents, did the USA switch to first a file? I was unclear if that actually ended up being part of the recent patent reform.

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://philip.greenspun.com/business/internet-software- paten...](http://philip.greenspun.com/business/internet-software-patents)

...sums up a big part of the problem.

</comment><comment><USER7> The USPTO is backed up by several years. Even if you have a cookie cutter patent application, it will take several years before it is issued. It also commits you towards a product/strategy direction when it may be better to not file, and stay flexible.

Software intellectual property is typically protected by trade secret rather than patents.

<comment><USER8> > It also commits you towards a product/strategy direction when it may be > better to not file, and stay flexible.

No, it doesn't. Filing a patent application doesn't obligate you to practice it.

Trademarks are use it or lose it.

<comment><USER7> you're right that there is no specific obligation. however, if you spend $20k+ and several years of partial mindshare on a specific technology, you're much more committed and thus less flexible.

trade secret and trademarks are two different things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Postgres ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=109387> ) and MySQL ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=118791> ) would both run faster if they didn't avoid patented methods.

<comment><USER10> This alone doesn't make a very good argument, unless you're arguing against any sort of protected intellectual property.

I mean Ford's cars might get better gas mileage if they didn't have to avoid patents by Toyota. Project Gutenberg would have a lot more free books if they didn't avoid copyrighted works.

I think the poster was looking for solid flaws in the system regarding software. For example, the frivolous nature of things like 1-click (though I think Amazon has had a hard time keeping that from being attacked right and left).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Because the costs of software patents outweigh the benefits. I think that the equation is different for other fields (biotech, for instance) though.

</comment><comment><USER12> patents are fine for some industries but for software they do more harm than good.</comment>


Yhat Sciencebox - <AUTHOR> http://blog.yhathq.com/posts/yhat-sciencebox.html <comment><USER2> I think this is cool but for me personally it would be so much cooler if it was open-source. Sure I understand they want to make money with it but really this doesn't offer me enough more than my current setup that I would be willing to pay $0.05 - $1.40 per hour. That's up to $33 per day or $1041 per month, (quite) pricey for some background execution and rsync functionality.

My current setup is to use a workhorse server where I set up a samba share for my home folder (so I can edit scripts remotely from my notebook without the git-push-pull dance) and a remote iPython notebook. Both config files are write once and forget and I get 90% of their functionality built in (without the web GUI). Would love to learn about other people's setup though, I am sure mine can be improved.

<comment><USER3> well the range is really $36 - $1,041 per month. That seems reasonable depending upon what you need.

<comment><USER4> Assuming the upper end of that--for a lab with 10 researchers (forget the students, postdocs, etc. for a second), you could save maybe half the cost by hiring a single IT person to do this. Aside from their sb client, I don't see anything in this that can't be downloaded and installed (either from source or automagically from any of the freely available science-related R, Python, etc. repos).

Neat idea, I just find it difficult to justify a $1000/mo per-machine cost, especially in academia.

<comment><USER5> You can hire IT people for 12k a year?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This pairs well with the recent AirBNB fraud detection article. Airbnb has a lot of people to construct a robust machine learning architecture. For small start ups trying to make a recommendation engine, why not do sciencebox+ yhat cloud/enterprise? Especially for data science people that are don't have great dev skills.

</comment><comment><USER7> Seems like a useful tool that would make doing data analysis on a remote machine much easier than with plain old AWS + anaconda.

However, the incremental improvement of renting an EC2 instance (even with 8 cores and 65gb) pales in comparison to using a distributed data processing approach with medium to large datasets. Any plans for supporting Hadoop/Spark + Amazon EMR in the future?

</comment><comment><USER8> Two things: \- GPU instance support would be really really helpful \- Pricing of the higher perf tiers is a bit painful which changes the normal AWS $ optimization metrics pretty massively

Otherwise -- it's definitely something we'd consider using; I end up doing 99% of my work on my laptop because AWS setup fixed cost time is 30minutes plus every time.

</comment><comment><USER9> Every time I see one of these pop up I'm reminded that one of these days I'll need to get around to automating my data analysis and re-learning R :(

And perhaps updating the COBOL scripts from 1970-something that I inherited

</comment><comment><USER10> Oh brilliant, I'd be interested to hear how this compares with Statwing, which seems to be going for the same market. Definitely a useful service.

<comment><USER11> Statwing is trying to do nice visualizations and analysis in a web browser, without programming. This is more of a way to use R or python to do data analysis on a remote AWS machine. You still have to know what you're doing in R or python, but it makes the "remote" part easy.

<comment><USER10> I had thought Statwing set up the remote stuff and then automated a lot of tasks in-browser, but it doesn't seem to give the easy access this does. This is a lot more attractive!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Awesome! The "get an email when your job has finished" takes me back to the days of True BASIC on the Dartmouth time-sharing system.</comment>


879% drug price hike is one of 3,400 in 2019 so far; rate of hikes increasing - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/big-pharma-raising-drug-prices-even-more-in-2019-3400-hikes-as-high-as-879/ <comment><USER2> This is probably a good time to just dump most of the prescription drugs. The more I dig into them, the more I find they are just derivatives of naturally occurring compounds. The natural compound are not as potent, but maybe that is sufficient for some people. I will work on an open source list of alternatives.</comment>


Google doesn't get 'social', but Apple doesn't understand the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.decipher.org/2011/02/blind-spots.html

<comment><USER2> Exhibit A: iTunes (the service) is essentially blocked off from being accessed by people who don't have iTunes (the program) installed. This becomes VERY obvious if you run Linux. The App Store and the iTune music library are not easily searchable or browseable from your Linux PC.

3rd party websites that do this instead aren't really the point, either.

<comment><USER3> I don't think that makes a very compelling exhibit, given that "the internet" is not "all things you can get to via a web browser". The internet, rather, is IP, TCP, UDP, etc...and every protocol built on top of it. This includes HTTP & HTML (which iTunes leverages heavily) but also a many other things that are not browser-oriented.

Regardless, I think your exhibit is more easily explained by Apple understanding exactly who is likely to spend money and making them want to be their customers. I'm a huge Debian fanatic, but I have to admit that the linux users are the most tight-fisted demographic I've ever seen.

<comment><USER4> _but I have to admit that the linux users are the most tight-fisted demographic I've ever seen._

This seems to suggest the exact opposite of what you just said: [http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/28471/Humble_Indie_Bundle...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/28471/Humble_Indie_Bundle_Charity_Drive_Approaches_700000.php)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that always gets trotted out in this context. If what you think this suggests is true there would be more than one such story. To me it just smells of a demographic grateful of finally getting some mercy sex.

Besides, it's a charity. I was talking about commerce.

<comment><USER4> Well, one real story is a whole lot more compelling than hearsay.

<comment><USER5> He has a bit more than hearsay going for him; Apple's success in various markets lately has been huge. Linux's success in getting people to spend anything like that kind of money in any consumer context? Basically nil.

Come on, we all know this, we don't need a page of citations to prove to us that Apple is the biggest non-Exxon company in world history, and it's not by accident or some mysterious means.

<comment><USER6> Linux's 'failure' in getting people to spend "that kind of money" in a consumer context is most likely due to the fact that it's not a centrally- owned commercial entity with a product line and shareholders (i.e. what Apple Inc. is), not due to do any actual 'failure'.

I'm not saying that the users of Apple products and those of Linux distributions _don't_ differ in their purchasing habits (and I'm not saying they do, either)--I'm just pointing out the flaw in this line of reasoning.

And I don't know why you keep repeating this "biggest non-Exxon company in world history" argument, too. It's sensationalist and by two of the most common metrics, false:

* By market capitalization they've been the biggest in only three quarters in history (most recent), all of which are smaller than other companies in history: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporations_by_market_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporations_by_market_capitalization)

* By revenue there are many, many non-Exxon (i.e. oil?) companies bigger than Apple: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_by_revenue>

<comment><USER5> I'm repeating it because it's fun and useful shorthand for saying that Apple has become incomprehensibly huge lately, not out of some innate desire to mislead you personally. :) And come on; it's clearly not a linchpin of my "argument", which does not fall flat just because PetroChina and whoever else might also be really big. Nor am I delivering some cruel insult to Linux. I loves me some Linux. I was just pointing out the facts.

As an aside, it would appear that Linux now has an exciting new path to earning money: winning Jeopardy!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it would be more accurate to say that from Apple's perspective 'the internet' is more than just the World Wide Web. Apps (and desktop applications) are peers to the browser - not something that necessarily has to run within it.

Part of the reason so much online activity shifted to the web in the web 1.0 era was that the browser sidestepped the problems of distributing and updating client applications.

With its app stores, Apple has solved these problems, and put applications back on an equal footing with web apps.

Whether or not this is is the winning strategy over the long term remains to be seen, but I think it's hard to make the case that Apple doesn't understand the internet.

</comment><comment><USER8> Apple understands the internet, it just doesn't like what it sees. There's a lot of smut, hate speech, pirated content, and malware out there.

Just as Google has tried to do with its search engine, Apple is building a system that makes it easy to find quality content. Content that is legal, age rated and doesn't harm your devices. A lot of families value those qualities over 'absolute freedom'.

<comment><USER9> I would disagree. Apple fundamentally doesn't understand the Internet. MobileMe/.Mac has been a decent disaster for a long time, not even able to meet the quality levels of services that Google gives away for free. That's not because Apple chooses to not like bits about the net, that's because Apple doesn't seem to have any idea what its doing in that space.

I'd say that Apple doesn't just not understand the Internet, but at a higher level, it doesn't understand _communication_. Look at the iOS notification system: it is, and always has been, fundamentally broken. It assumes you'll only get a single notification, and that that notification is so important that it should interrupt your current app to get it.

Apple have been selling computers in phone formats. Android, Microsoft, and especially Palm, are selling you communicators, that pulls in data from all over your communication space and centralizes it. Apple doesn't seem to know how to do this (or assumes most people don't have an online persona in various locations, which I think most people really do).

<comment><USER8> What you're saying is that Apple doesn't understand social networking and cloud services. I agree, but I suspect Apple is working on those; although it's anyone's guess what they're going to do with the massive data center they've just built in NC.

The article was about Apple trying to control how people interact with content on the internet. The author feels that that's against the nature of the internet, hence: "Apple doesn't understand the internet".

<comment><USER9> Well, to be fair, the author only has one paragraph about Apple and the Internet, and you could get multiple readings from it :) When I read control and centralization, I don't just think of iTunes, but I do think of Apple's dogged insistence that everything you do is essentially tied to one machine. Your iPhone, and (as I think Tim Bray described it "monsterously") your iPad, need to be sync'd to a computer when they start up, for no compelling reason. My Android phone lets me type in my Google ID and off I go.

Honestly, I think Apple's attitude towards the Internet is not because they don't like it. I think they just don't know what to do with it, certainly aren't willing to partner with companies that do, and they're letting their market get chipped away little by little. I've felt like Apple have been resting on their laurels for years, software-wise. Jonathan Ive is producing great hardware, but year on year competitors are catching up or surpassing Mac OS X and iOS, and Apple doesn't seem to notice/care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thinking about the questions at the end,

Microsoft is (or was) really good at backwards compatibility (and making it easy to import other formats into their own). This is their weakness: they are focused on getting content into their own formats.

Facebook's strength is to get people to impart information into their system. Their weakness is in always trying to make it public (or at the least visible to anyone you friend)

<comment><USER11> My slightly different spin:

Microsoft is very good at understanding the median user. Their sweet spot is _good enough_ to justify paying rather than reassuringly expensive, and they impress users with feature lists and [sometimes illusory] choice over usability and extensibility. As a result their products can be pretty horrible for beginners and power users alike, and their blindness towards early adopters leaves them paying catchup in markets like smartphones

Facebook's strength is addictiveness; they understand how to get eyeballs in. Their weakness is a failure to add much value to users' lives beyond voyeurism and distraction.

<comment><USER12> this bit of thread makes me feel like it's time for neal stephenson to write a sequel to in the beginning was the command line, only this time the car companies are apple, google and facebook instead of microsoft, apple, be, and linux.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Google doesn't know how to have fun"

Has anyone ever actually said this? Between the logo doodles, April fools jokes, and bright colors, Google is one of the funnest companies around.

<comment><USER14> Don't forget silly extras you find from time to time (kayak across the Pacific in Maps, 'Undo send' in gmail). How often do you find things like that from large companies?

<comment><USER15> Undo send is awesome - my ADD ass always remembers one more thing just after hitting send. The delay helps on a mental level oddly enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What this is basically saying is that the software these companies create doesn't understand the complexities and chaos of human interaction and thought.

Pretty sure people have been working on this problem for a while, and it won't be solved anytime soon.

<comment><USER17> Agreed. How can you possibly expect a computer to make a non-optimal decision, such as humans regularly do (e.g., the lottery, short versus long-term output, etc.)? Until we can model these decisions, there will be areas that tech falls flat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Apps are a return to the walled garden -- the anti-Internet, if you will.

<comment><USER19> No they are not! apps mostly use the internet for their data, but provide a richer UX than what a web browser can do. The internet is the underpinning of most apps.

<comment><USER20> But so much of the beauty of the Internet is its portable ubiquity; I can write a website once and it's available in much the same format to Windows, MacOS, Unix, iOS, Android.... you name it. Whereas in the mobile world we're seeing _millions_ spent on creating what are essentially platform-specific mobile data clients in parallel versions. They're barely even superior to what's possible with HTML now. This is madness.

<comment><USER21> _They're barely even superior to what's possible with HTML now._

If this were really the case — not just in a spec-sheet way but in a user experience way — why are all these companies making apps?

<comment><USER22> Because customers can buy apps in one click, so they do.

If webapps had the same payment/installation procedure, they'd take off like a rocket too. (Given HTML5's local caching and the like.)

<comment><USER23> I'd love if it that was true, but the evidence isn't really there.

For instance, Chrome Web Store offers a payment/installation for web apps, and it doesn't seem to be taking off like a rocket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> iOS tries hard to make web apps first class citizens. And the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript parts that make this possible are in HTML5.

It's not that Apple doesn't understand the internet, it's that many geeks want "native" apps, rather than having web apps on mobile devices. Apple tolerates these apps, but just barely, and offers the web as the way out of their walled garden.

<comment><USER25> >Apple tolerates these [native] apps, but just barely, and offers the web as the way out of their walled garden.

Geeks wanting native apps, and Apple reluctantly going along may have been the case when the iPhone & App Store first began, but Apple has long since realized that the app channel is very valuable to users and to the platform, and that control over that channel will be hugely profitable.

If Apple really wanted to have webapps be first class iOS citizens, they would provide Phonegap capabilities standardized in the native browser (<http://www.phonegap.com/>).

<comment><USER24> PhoneGap seems interesting, but I don't fully understand it yet. Which of its capabilities should be added to the browser? Should they be standardized in HTML5 or should they be part of a devices OS?

<comment><USER26> PhoneGap provides, if you include its JavaScript file in your PhoneGap-wrapped web app, JavaScript APIs to the camera, stored photos, the address book, and some other stuff.

Some of this stuff is in 'HTML5', like geolocation, but much of it isn't. Apple could have provided custom APIs to the camera and so on and allowed people to access it from their iOS-specific web apps.

The way that an API gets to be a standard is that someone implements it and people use it - if Apple had included a camera access API in Mobile Safari, it probably would have found its way into a spec and been implemented by other browsers.

Your last question seems confused: HTML/CSS rendering and JavaScript processing is part of the device's OS (in the form of its web browser). No browser does everything that's in the standard, and most browsers do things that aren't in the standard. Just adding it to the spec for HTML5 wouldn't be directly meaningful.

<comment><USER27> _a camera access API in Mobile Safari, it probably would have found its way into a spec and been implemented by other browsers_

To give the curious an idea of what that might look like: [http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current- work/complete/c...](http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current- work/complete/commands.html#devices)

<comment><USER26> Exactly. I would be surprised if people working on WebKit for Apple weren't involved in those kind of discussions, and would fully expect Mobile Safari to support a workable device API.

I wonder how long before iOS development is like WebOS development?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'd venture to say the internet doesn't get Apple. Many geeks are just anti anything Apple, and have an irrational hatred for them.

Apple have made huge contributions to the internet, such as Webkit, promoting web standards, the iPhone and yes, even the iTunes store - still the biggest internet-based media distribution channel.

<comment><USER19> Nearly every geek I know has a MBP, and every startup I've worked at uses the same.

<comment><USER29> His statement definitely feels true the other way though; the most ani-Apple people are geeks.

<comment><USER30> Well, of course. That is how fandom works. I don't particularly care if Bella gets with Jacob or Edwards, but I don't like the Twilight books. In order to dislike a particular team/company/entity, you probably have to passionate about the field in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The author claims that Google doesn't "get" social because social relies on messiness and Google's forte is providing order. However, Facebook, an organization who does seem to understand social exceedingly well, is known for its emphasis on organization. We see stories about the higher-ups in Facebook, such as Zuckerberg, and their heavy hitters whom have gone on to other projects (colloquially known as the "Facebook Mafia") all sharing this desire to organize messy, chaotic information across numerous domains.

If Facebook succeeds in social, at least in part because of its attention to order and organization, why is this fatal for Google?

<comment><USER32> In my opinion, facebook can see order where others would see chaos. Order does not mean hierarchical yet too often those are the buckets information is placed in. Facebook identifies hubs and organize things around those hubs. Flexible yet rigid organizational structures are the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > _"What, for example, is Microsoft really, really good at? Or Facebook?"_

Microsoft is really good at B2B.

Facebook has a great email replacement because it does not fill your inbox with your friend's vacation photos, but still provides the opportunity to view them.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think facebook understand human intra-actions. It understand community. But it lacks understanding complications in relationships. What is lacks is understanding of what is excess of usual social-ness. I dont really think they are helping anyone with their social gaming time-waste-con or their wall post advertisements or lot of means to do completely unproductive stuff.

For Microsoft its simple. They understand customers, and they understand that avg customer never needs over-excellence in product. So, they would never be creative like apple, or tech-savvy like google. Its sad, but the software giant will never be upto the mark when it comes to driving technology and innovations.

</comment><comment><USER35> People buy Apple because they like the way they work in comparison to everything else. Since a lot of people seem to be buying Apple devices, by extension does that mean a lot of people don't understand the internet?

</comment><comment><USER36> This article doesn't make sense. Recap: Apple gets people but doesn't get the internet because the internet is too messy. Google gets the internet but doesn't get people because people are too messy.

</comment><comment><USER37> what is this article about? It is totally random, not edited. It clearly lacks lack of thought.

</comment><comment><USER38> Google has failed multiple times at launching social apps. Is there an equivalent series of Apple failures from being too controlling? If not, what makes this a blindspot?

<comment><USER39> iTools, .Mac and MobileMe. Also, Ping.

<comment><USER40> The first 3 are the same thing and aren't even social apps.

But, iTools was great when it was around. Way ahead of its time and free! When they went to subscription model I think most early adopters had a hard time justifying the price when you could get hotmail for nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Internet != Web

</comment><comment><USER28> Also I think Google get social, they appreciate it's potential but just haven't succeeded at it yet. They weren't focused on it.

<comment><USER17> What is your evidence to support that statement? All I see is many attempts that indicate Google gets that social is important. All those attempts seem to illustrate (to me), that they don't get how to do it, or what the core ideas in "social" are about.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: The "porn-site" LEAVE button problem - <AUTHOR> Sorry for this Ladies and Gents, I know you don't visit any porn sites. (I don't visit any porn sites exactly as you don't do that!).
Ok, I tell the truth: In my free time, I do visit many-kinds of porn sites (for research purpose only of course :),...
## This is what I find interesting: The usual concept of a "index-page" of a porn website is to let you decide to: "ENTER" or "LEAVE", the website. (Actually: Any user has always the 3-rd (third) option, to close the web browser window/tab! OK!
now....:
## My Question #1: Is anyone (except Me) disturbed by the fact that 99.9% porn sites, are linking the "LEAVE" action to: "google.com" or "disney.com"???
## My Question #2: Who invented schema like that? And why is anyone following this pattern? <comment><USER2> It's not just porn sites. You'll see the same thing applied to other sin sites, such as for for alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, "adult novelties" and gambling.

I don't find it disturbing, but I think it shows a lack of development effort to basically cut/paste such obvious tropes from just about every other sin site on the Internet.</comment>


If 5G Is So Important, Why Isn't It Secure? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/21/opinion/5g-cybersecurity-china.html <comment><USER2> The author does not seem to understand the engineering background. Security should not be trusted on such a low layer of the network stack.

No matter which attacker we want protection against, the points to secure are client and server, not the middle-boxes.

This is one of the well known reasons HTTP/2 is implemented by browser vendors only on a secure channel.

Here we are talking about implementing security in hardware (bad idea: hard to upgrade as security requirements and practices chage) at a very low level (at data link layer). If this is to skip security at higher levels of the stack, you have to trust all hardware vendors and operators worldwide. If we don't, we can as well communicate on an insecure channel: that's what modern TLS provides.

Of course to get all users to use only secure channels is a lot of work, it's just that there is no easier alternative that provides this same result.

Granted, the author might have something else in mind: he might want communication to be safe only against some parties, but not others.

<comment><USER3> I disagree with you - security is important at all layers of the stack. Right now, your mobile phone will connect to fake towers (Stingray). This means that SMS 2FA codes can be intercepted to you, I believe.

[https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/04/06/washington-dc- aw...](https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/04/06/washington-dc-awash-with- fake-cell-towers/)

<comment><USER4> Consider a world where the cellular data protocol is totally secure and nothing else changes. Your SMS 2FA codes can still be intercepted by your service provider and anyone else who handles the message before it gets to them.

Now consider a world where SMS is end-to-end encrypted. Nobody can intercept your 2FA codes, no matter how insecure the transport is.

<comment><USER5> End-to-end encryption doesn't solve your problem when the attacker is your first link network provider, without out-of-band signaling.

Which I believe was parent's point. Attestation and authentication of network infrastructure (in a way that would preclude Stingray attacks) is equally important as anything you layer on top.

Otherwise, without some sort of global PKI you can consult out of band, you're just rolling the dice that the cellular station you're connecting to isn't rogue and performing a man in the middle attack.

<comment><USER4> Without some sort of global PKI, how do you know your data connection actually goes to your cell provider?

<comment><USER5> I assume the way most embedded devices guarantee security for their limited number of use cases -- pre-seed trusted root keys in hardware + validate signing against them when connecting.

My point was that app-layer security magic doesn't mean much if your first network step is "connect to closest, highest power base station and implicitly trust it."

There are wonderful things we can do _on top_ of lower layer protocols, but the lower layers are pretty damn important too.

<comment><USER4> That's how, for example, TLS works too.

I don't understand what you mean when you say that app-level security doesn't mean much if your first network step is compromised. TLS will protect you there, as will any other decently implemented end-to-end encrypted protocol.

<comment><USER5> TLS has the benefit of a world-wide PKI built around it to attest to authentication.

I was trying to note the risks to PKI-less / web of trust participants, and should have called that out explicitly.

Mostly because I'd much rather live in an encrypted world where WoT is the dominant mode, vs corporate-controlled PKI. And the biggest risks there seems like the step no one can get around in ordinary use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > It was 4G that gave us the smartphone.

Smartphones existed since the early 2000's, well before the first 4G deployment in 2009. From the Smartphone wikipedia entry:

 _" The first iPhone also faced criticism for not supporting the latest 3G wireless network standards, but was praised for its hardware and software design, and its June 2007 release was met with heavy demand"_

<comment><USER7> I have had 4g disabled for years as I've found it somehow slower and significantly less reliable than 3G, across multiple devices. I can stream music and watch YouTube videos just fine.

This is on O2 (UK). Maybe I need a new network.

<comment><USER8> I'm on O2 too and it's garbage. I can't wait till my contract is up to switch. I often have full signal but nothing will load, whilst mates on Three or EE are fine. When it does work, it's so slow. And it's not a local thing either, it's everywhere I go.

<comment><USER9> Interesting, post above yours says O2 and Vodafone share network, and I'm on Vodafone but rarely if ever have issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find nothing in the article that shows 5G is not secure. It is a blatant appeal to increase FCC's power and funding.

Shame on the NYT for publishing unsubstantiated position papers written by a political operator ("By Tom Wheeler, Mr. Wheeler is a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.") under a misleading headline.

<comment><USER11> You should look deeper. Wheeler has had an interesting career.

At one time he was head of the main cable industry trade group, back when cable was trying to be David to the TV network's over-the-air Goliath. This was when cable was just about video, because cable internet had not yet been invented.

Later, he was head of the main cellular and wireless trade group, when they were the newcomers for both voice and data, against the big wired telecommunications companies.

These past positions had a lot of people worried when he was appointed FCC chairman, over concern that he would favor industry. What most observers failed to notice was both of those positions were at times when their respective industries were the upstarts, going against established monopolies or near monopolies, trying to bring competition and wider services to consumers. In other words, he represented those industries at a time when being pro-cable or pro-wireless, respectively, was being pro-consumer.

When he was at the FCC, several decades after his association with the cable industry, and about a decade after his association with the wireless industry, when the interests of those industries and consumers had diverged, he tended to go with the consumer side. The cable and wireless companies were definitely not fans of Wheeler's FCC actions, fighting in court against almost everything he did.

In the 20 or so years between the job representing the cable industry and the job representing the wireless industry, he was a founder or major executive in several companies, including at least one that failed due to lack of net neutrality. Some of these companies have been telecommunications related, but some had nothing to do with that (e.g., one is in aerospace components, and one or more have been in banking).

He's also a former director of PBS and was chairman and president of the National Archives Foundation. He's combined his interest in American history and telecommunication in a well reviewed book about the Civil War called "Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War" [1].

Dismissing him as merely a "political operator" seems rather shallow.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061129801/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061129801/)

<comment><USER12> Wheeler's past history doesn't invalidate the article's lack of substance.

<comment><USER13> Agreed. In fact the disconnect should make anyone reasonable ask why he would write such an article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The USG has a bad history when it comes to "aiding" telecommunications security[0]. Historically they have prioritized making sure things are weak against their own attacks over making sure things are secure against other attacks (and, of course, from the perspective of a private citizen the government's attacks may well be malicious.)

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip)

</comment><comment><USER15> I realize he's writing to a general audience here, but I hope he writes a more technical version of what the heck he's talking about here. 5G is basically L1. IMO most of the security should happen at higher layers, for practical implementation reasons as well as flexability. For how long it's going to be around, anything built into the protocol will probably be broken at some point, and since it's L1 it's extremely hard to fix.

<comment><USER16> I definitely don't want anyone to tap into my phone calls or SMS. And I also don't want carriers to sell the data they collect about me, or have insecure infrastructure so that it can be obtained by criminals. It's not that I'm not giving them any money, they shouldn't sell my data.

<comment><USER2> Agreed, but it can be done at higher layers. Just use some secure app instead of SMS and phone calls.

The carrier should not be able to know much about you, except some vague metadata (an histogram of the amount of data you exchanged with some IPs.)

<comment><USER17> This is a common and incorrect misconception.

The network needs security, as does the applications running on it. These are different security layers, and cannot be provided together.

With an insecure network, even if your applications are secure, then bad actors (government, company, whoever) have a much easier time attacking your phone directly. Perfectly secure applications and an insecure network leaves your phone open to attack from nearby radios. If we assume your applications are all perfectly secure, and your phone software and hardware are also all perfectly secure, then that leaves abuse of the network as a tool to affect denial of service, spying on presence meta-data, and not limited to the carrier.

But of course there are no perfectly secure applications, nor any perfectly secure phones. So keep in mind that the weak network greatly expands the attack surface from which bad actors can mess with your phone.

This isn't a problem solved with layer-7 security.

<comment><USER18> Since the infrastructure is beholden to governments, one must assume that the data link layer is compromised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's not secure because any widely rolled out physical layer is by definition compromised.

All infrastructure in a country is beholden to that country's government, and that will never change. Any attempt to put encryption into a widely used physical layer will fail, because no committee will agree on an effective implementation that actually works (governments WILL subvert any committee). Governments will insist upon backdoors or sniffers, and hardware has the disadvantage of being in one physical place, easily targeted by a government.

The physical layer is compromised, and always will be.

</comment><comment><USER19> _> "It was 4G that gave us the smartphone."_

The iPhone was released in June 2007, more than 3 years before the first LTE phone was released in November 2010. The iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, but it did kick off the smartphone boom. And it did it without even 3G; the original iPhone only supported 2G (despite widespread, but not universal, rollout of 3G in the USA).

<comment><USER20> The first Iphone didn't even have 3G.

<comment><USER19> Yes, I said that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is this article just implying that because security isn't regulated the network is insecure? Or has some legitimate vulnerability been found here? Seems very politicized too.

<comment><USER12> I was hoping to see at least some hints as to why the security of 5G is flawed in its current state. The only argument I seem to parse out of this is what you stated.

Note that the author is Tom Wheeler - former chairman of the FCC. It does seem to be a 100% political piece rather than anything to do with the tech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I get that it is an opinion piece, but claiming that autonomous cars need 5G or that these cars would be remote controlled (so not autonomous at all and useless in a tunnel) makes this article just sound horribly uninformed.

<comment><USER23> Why? It's the truth. Tesla is already connected to cellular networks. Once 5G really takes off, what makes you think manufacturers aren't going to race to have the first autonomous vehicle connected via 5G? There will be whole marketing campaigns revolving around that very thing.

<comment><USER24> I believe the parent was trying to point out the inconsistencies in calling something "autonomous" yet still saying that it's incapable to doing things without a cell connection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > It was 4G that gave us the smartphone

I remember using my trusty BlackBerry back with 2G. The first iPhone launched with just 2G. If you want to talk about the general rise of the smartphone, then it would be about 3G.

</comment><comment><USER25> Almost any wireless link will be subject to man in the middle attacks by nature, in my view. If you can sniff the medium, you eventually can probably find a way to intercept it.

Wired connections are more secure, or perceived to be so because the assumption is that sniffing the medium is more difficult, which is generally true because someone would have to physically make a connection (unauthorized) to your cable and the assumption is that it would be detected (perhaps).

It's just a lot easier to sniff your channel over the air.

5G can be implemented on any piece of spectrum, sub-1Ghz, mid-Ghz or so called mm-wave. One thing about mm-wave that makes it "more cable like" is the highly directional nature. 5G that is being deployed on mm-wave bands (e.g. 28Ghz) have extremely small beam widths due to the use of Phased Array antennas. This makes it much more difficult to "sting-ray". or at least is more easily detected.

Having said all this... everyone should always keep in mind that whatever wireless network you are on, GSM, CDMA, HSPA, LTE, Wifi, 5G whatever, you cannot count on the phy layer for protection.

</comment><comment><USER26> Well, first off, is there a way to get stingrays broken such that they would be identified as rogue base stations and locked out as untrusted? If not, then hello to being compromised. Not that it would stop the NSA, but at least 3rd party or rogue states would not be able to deploy them if this could be achieved.

</comment><comment><USER27> To me, it's absolutely unclear what the author is actually talking about. Should telcos be responsible for monitoring the devices in their network?

Mobile networks provide Internet access with all the risks associated to the Internet. But the radio access is reasonably secure, if we compare with public WiFi. It's encrypted, authenticated and the operators are more trustworthy than the random person that puts up an Access-Point with years-old firmware. (the operators have something to loose here)

</comment><comment><USER28> We haven't built anything flawless so I'm not sure if it is fair to blame anyone for building something that might not be secure without any evidence.

No matter who is going to lead 5G technology, The service provider will have full control as they already have. They will be still able to do everything that they are doing already.

So we will have our domestic controls and it is secure it that sense.

Perhaps, What we might not have is having our backdoors to have the same powers in all other countries around the world.

</comment><comment><USER29> Slightly off topic, but I wonder how much net savings (% world GDP?) would we have if there was no need to secure our communications. At least some energy and time would be saved as a result, comms would be faster.

<comment><USER30> I wonder how many (security-related) jobs would be lost as result?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> If you put the security in the baseband, you're stuck with whatever you put in there for many decades, if you put it in higher level protocols, you're probably not.

</comment><comment> a-dub what applications, exactly, are waiting in the wings for more mobile bandwidth? i can already stream video in both directions...

i think i'd prefer more innovation in terms of security and privacy rather than more bandwidth that nobody really knows what to do with...

</comment><comment><USER32>
         The new Congress should use its oversight power
         to explore just why the administration has failed to do
         to protect against that risk, ...

New York Times, grammar, really?

</comment><comment><USER33> Is 5G so important?

<comment><USER34> Yes

<comment><USER33> Why? It's just faster and I already can stream video and play realtime games on 4g. What are other more demanding applications?

<comment><USER35> No. It's not just faster.

I understand that US based media and forums like HN are little behind on mobile tech, but how it is that this thing persists even 2019.

For starters, There is bandwidth not owned by carriers. You can have your own 5G hubs. Companies can have their own 5G networks in factories. Unlike Wi-Fi, you can have more control of latency and reliability. So for example factory with 5G networking between robots etc. is possibility.

Connection density, energy efficiency, area data rate, very low latency, virtual networks etc. allow completely different applications.

Say, you have peak utilization of graphics card for gaming around 5%, if you can have the card in the edge servers and play the game by streaming it from nearby servers, it's more efficient use of HW and enables mobile games that phone hardware does not support. South Korea or some Chinese cities might be the first to lead mobile gaming to this direction.

ps. Nvidia has already demoed GPU in base station over 5G with 60Hz 16ms lag and promises 3ms in the near future.

<comment><USER36> Companies already can have their own 4G networks in factories etc. It's fairly common in mining or oil fields.

There have been wireless access platforms with much more control over latency and robustness for well over a decade.

Bandwidth not owned by carriers is also not new. LTE-U is a recent example.

This all sounds similar to the hype that comes with every other new generation of last-mile access technology.

<comment><USER37> > Companies already can have their own 4G networks in factories etc. It's > fairly common in mining or oil fields.

Without getting special permission from a carrier? The ability to set up your own wireless equipment that can supply normal phones is an important use case.

> Bandwidth not owned by carriers is also not new. LTE-U is a recent example.

Wikipedia says LTE-U died. And as far as I can tell LTE-LAA only speeds up _existing_ LTE connections; it can't work standalone. There's MulteFire? It's only half-developed though.

<comment><USER38> I wonder if OP is confusing factories getting a carrier to install a cell site (whether it be a pico/microcell or a proper macrocell site) on/near the factory property. It's not unusual for that to happen (especially if said factory is a big customer for the carrier) but it wouldn't be their own 4G network. Would be interested if any actual examples of real life non-carrier 4G networks could be provided.

<comment><USER36> I'm well aware of the differences between pico, macro etc. and am referring specifically to usage of privately owned eNodeBs running in spectrum that is either unlicensed, sublicensed, or just reused without authorization because the deployment site is sufficiently rural.

> Would be interested if any actual examples of real life non-carrier 4G > networks could be provided.

For one, you can just look for companies deploying Redline, Nokia, etc eNodeBs that aren't traditional telcos...

[http://rdlcom.com/applications/private- lte](http://rdlcom.com/applications/private-lte)

LTE equipment for 5.8Ghz spectrum / LTE-U has been on the market for some time and in use by private industry and boutique service providers. E.g. [https://www.doubleradius.com/Manufacturers/Kits/baicells- sta...](https://www.doubleradius.com/Manufacturers/Kits/baicells-starter-kit- lte-u.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I was expecting a discussion around the safety around 5G, as there is no scientific consensus around whether 5g is actually harmful to humans. [https://www.jrseco.com/european-union-5g-appeal- scientists-w...](https://www.jrseco.com/european-union-5g-appeal-scientists- warn-of-potential-serious-health-effects-of-5g/)

<comment><USER40> since when is "secure" ever associated with "healthy"?

<comment><USER41> In German, the words for "secure" and "safe" are the same. 5G being safe doesn't sound too far from 5G being healthy.

<comment><USER42> Even in this context?

They're synonyms in English in some contexts, (e.g. 'I feel safe/secure here') just not this one.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sixty years ago the modern computer was born in a lab in Manchester. - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7465115.stm

<comment><USER3> _The room-sized computer's ability to carry out different tasks - <USER2> having to be rebuilt - has led some to describe it as the "first modern PC"._

Definitely a landmark achievement for humanity, but hardly a "personal computer".

<comment><USER4> This is for a lay-audience.

<comment><USER5> How does using "PC" help the lay audience? Would simply using the word "computer" been confusing?

Now the lay audience goes away with false understanding. Who wins with that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a little spun, I think. Clearly there were earlier computers (like ENIAC and Colossus, which the article mentions) that also pioneered critical innovations. Equally clearly, there were many more inventions to come. The article seems to pick out "program stored in volatile memory" (ENIAC, at least, was hand-programmed offline. I'm not sure about Colossus) as the defining characteristic of the "modern computer".

Meh. I might argue that CMOS VLSI process technology was actually more important, being the biggest "hard part" of figuring out how to manufacture the actual computers we use in modernity. But whatever, everyone has their own favorites I'm sure: do we all get to write articles for the BBC?

</comment><comment><USER7> Last weekened I visited my aunt who lives round the corner from the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchetster - it's well worth a visit if you're in the area. <http://www.msim.org.uk/></comment>


How can I estimate monthly server costs for N customers?* - <AUTHOR>

I am trying to put together a feasibility study for a python/django powered webapp I am developing.  How can I provide an estimate of my monthly hardware/bandwidth server costs in the feasibility study? I assume it would have the form: *M->thousand 1) 0-2M users: $200/month 2) 2M-5M users: $500/month 3) 5M-10M users: $X/Month 4) 10M+ users: $Y/Month with cost of $Z per thousand users.<p>These are just random guesses at numbers and ranges.  What are some practical numbers to use for back of the envelope calculations?  It doesn't matter to me what technology would be used for each, just what some practical dollar costs would be in those ranges. <comment><USER2> here is a good calculator (This is a good starting point, not necessarily THE benchmark)...

<http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html>?

I am assuming you are,

a) familiar with AWS

b) able to estimate bandwidth usage based on active usage, Requests per second etc., which is your app specific anyway</comment>


Uber Q3 Results - <AUTHOR> https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2019/Uber-Announces-Results-for-Third-Quarter-2019/default.aspx <comment><USER3> Having new "one-time" charges every quarter means those are not one-time charges. They're part of the business, which means the business doesn't work.

One of Ubers biggest problems is that they have zero brand loyalty. For a company that sells a utility (get me, or my food, from A to B) rather than an experience (like a cool vacation in a unique mansion), I will always pick the cheapest option. Whether that's Uber or Bobs Taxis it doesn't matter. That means this whole business is a race to the bottom. Profits will stabilize at approximately zero for everyone in that business. The second huge problem is that nothing about providing this utility (neither the driving itself, nor the human labor required of the driver) has decreased since Uber came into existence. Driving a car from A to B still costs the same per mile (gas or electricity and wear and tear), and the driver still costs the same per hour (at least minimum wage). Uber has only made finding the ride more efficient but it has not made the actual ride itself more efficient. So in the best case, Uber can be as profitable as a taxi company. But ONLY if it raises its prices to taxi company levels. And then it's a taxi company. Taxis are expensive for a reason, because without a VC subsidy they have to be profitable to exist. And what if there are robot drivers? Wouldn't that eliminate at least the human cost? It would. But it would do so for every other transport company as well, and by the same amount. Since there is no customer loyalty for a transport like this, Uber would still be fighting the same competitors in a similar race to the bottom. In summary, nothing can save Uber.

<comment><USER4> At least for me uber has huge brand loyalty, it's sitting in the dock of my iPhone.

If I need to go somewhere, or get home, Uber has never let me down. Likewise with food delivery, I certainly have been let down on that but Uber does the best job of letting me track the order and get a refund if needed.

Sure Lyft is an alternative, I have it on my phone but simply never use it.

It's incorrect that nothing has changed about the cost of a ride. Taxi medallions used to be 500k-1m and require essentially taking out a mortgage. Now they are worth effectively $0.

And cost was never the core issue with Taxi's, it was the unpredictability of the cost, having to pay in cash because the drivers incentive is to skim from the owner, having to find one or call for one, having to put your trust in a random driver in a random country with no idea if you are going the right way.

Look to NYC where they seem to have set the goal of making Uber as expensive as possible (10s of dollars in random fees per ride). It's still popular - <USER2> a city with some of the best taxi options.

<comment><USER5> I switched to Lyft a few years ago because of Uber's evil ways. I've had zero problems.

If people won't stop using a company that is so blatantly bad we're in trouble.

<comment><USER6> For the past 25 years there has constantly been at least one tech company which is perceived in techie forums as so bad that it's incredible anyone would voluntarily use their products.

Those companies have been Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Financially you could have done amazingly well in the stock market simply by buying whatever big stock techies hate at the moment.

(Not saying Uber will necessarily continue this pattern. Even though they have the brand, I don't see how they intend to fix the enormous losses. That's very different from the optimized zero profit Amazon was making for years.)

<comment><USER7> Sorry for being the hn stereotype, but that's pure survivor bias. That "buy the hated" strategy would have left you with lots of worthless Unisys shares for example, they are down >> 90% from back when the GIF patent was putting them in the spotlight of unpopularity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You have to go past a lot of non-GAAP accounting to see that they actually lost $1.1B last quarter, almost all from operations. There is a nice chart showing all the things they are taking out to get their adjusted EBITDA of -0.5B.

It seems like they are always taking out a bunch of one time charges to claim that there core business would be profitable. But every quarter they have those charges. I don't understand how people say their ride sharing business is profitable. I mean maybe it is and I just don't understand how people think that. I would love it if someone would walk me through that.

<comment><USER9> Someday, I want to see a financial statement where the non-GAAP accounting makes the company look worse than GAAP accounting. Statistically, that should happen half the time. It doesn't.

<comment><USER10> Having worked with investment bankers: Statistically speaking, bankers develop various hypotheses re: what "adjustments" might be added to a financial model to make the company look better to investors. They tell their junior analysts to run the numbers, this flows down the chain, and many late nights and Seamless orders ensue. Experienced bankers have pretty good priors, so most of these hypotheses make the company look better. Even so, all but the best outcomes are rejected, and the analysts whose analyses ended up being useless complain to each other over copious amounts of alcohol.

Essentially, it's as if p-hacking were codified as an industry standard, which is to say, it's exactly p-hacking.

<comment><USER11> During the late 90's stock market boom, the CEO of the biggest bank in Finland made the company bottom line to match his personal phone number as a joke.

Getting first two numbers right was the hard part :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For those interested in the world of non-GAAP accounting, there are a wealth of resources (particularly from the Big 4 accountancies who are eager to consult on such matters). Broadly, the use of non-GAAP has grown to a point where the SEC ramped up enforcement measures (sending letters to companies regarding their presentation of non-GAAP measures)[1]. Particularly, GAAP measures need to be presented "with equal or greater prominence" to their non- GAAP counterparts.

From a Deloitte piece[2]:

"A study published by Audit Analytics noted that 97 percent of S&P 500 companies used non-GAAP measures in earnings releases during 2017. Further, the number of non-GAAP measures used per filing has almost tripled from 2.35 in 1996 to 7.45 in 2016.

In addition, a study published by FactSet indicated that for the second quarter of 2018, 77 percent of the companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average reported non-GAAP earnings per share and 61 percent of these companies reported non-GAAP earning per share that exceeded GAAP earnings per share."

[1] [https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/02/07/sec-scrutiny- of-n...](https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/02/07/sec-scrutiny-of-non-gaap- financial-measures/) [2] [https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/audit/articles/a-roadm...](https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/audit/articles/a-roadmap- to-non-gaap-financial-measures.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Basically they lost 10% of their gross bookings.

Does this mean that raising the price by 10% has them breaking even? Maybe.

It does show the immense potential though, their bookings are so large that 10 percent change would net them billions more. They are booking 1 billion dollars worth of rides every week.

<comment><USER14> > their bookings are so large that 10 percent change would net them billions > more.

Kind of a hot take, but this is why I'm long Uber. They're processing an insane amount of orders, and getting a huge amount of people using their app. If Lyft dies, or if a merger occurs, then we have a large ride share company that is still a lot more than 10% better than taxis. Most customers will still be taking Ubers, regardless of that 10% price hike.

Of course, this is just for the ride share business. I don't see how food delivery will be profitable long-term. Maybe it'll be just a loss leader for them?

<comment><USER15> No way a Lyft merger could be approved in any kind of sane society. It would turn a duopoly into a monopoly.

<comment><USER14> If both companies are approaching bankruptcy trying to outlast the other, wouldn't the lesser evil be a world with a ride-share monopoly rather than a world without (large scale) ridesharing?

With the amount of people that use these rideshare companies as their primary job or to make their daily commute, it seems hard to imagine going back to the pre-Uber/Lyft days. Not that the government or any regulatory body would see it this way. I just think consumers are better off with a monopoly here. Plus, whatever rideshare service that survives will still have to compete with local taxi companies.

<comment><USER16> If both Uber and Lyft go bankrupt we'd have a new rideshare service (or 20) before the ink was dry on the court papers. The public value is embodied in the concept, not in the companies.

<comment><USER17> There is a good chance suburban areas would not have ride sharing for a long time if that happened. All the alternatives popping up would be in cities and dense urban areas for a long time. Or if they get them, they might just be priced worse than the taxis.

<comment><USER18> Suburban areas already suck for ride shade. Try hailing a lyft in the proper suburbs, should take you over a half hour.

<comment><USER17> What is a proper suburb to you? Ride sharing is great for me in suburban areas of Delaware before as one example. Wait can be 15-20 min sometimes. Though it shouldn't be like that all the time. You can still see where the driver is, etc, via app. The price is cheap (I'd be willing to pay more). The experience is far better than hailing taxis used to be.

Suburban life is also different from city life. A 15-20 min isn't that bad in suburbs.

Life has become a lot more convenient currently for me in suburbs knowing ride sharing is around. I almost shivered thinking about the last time I used a taxi a decade ago in suburbs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> They're still losing money hand over fist - no surprise there. Looks like that is hitting the stock in after-hours for about -5%. Biggest takeaway for me is that gross revenue actually grew slower than total trips (30% vs 31%), which is an interesting trend.

<comment><USER20> Looks like Uber has two types of businesses. a) Ones that are slowing down, e.g. Rides with growth rate of ~20% and b) Ones that are growing faster by unsustainable economics, e.g. Freight -40% EBITDA. For Uber ever to thrive, they need a business that is growing fast with good economics. It doesn't look they have one anywhere on the horizon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There's another thing that needs to be said. Uber is receiving a lot of criticism here, but whether they eventually make it as a company or not, Uber is doing one important thing: Showing that a business model and profits matter. This has been neglected in the last decade or so. If bringing back that awareness is Uber's only contribution, then no matter the company's outcome, it will have done a good thing.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://s23.q4cdn.com/407969754/files/doc_financials/2019/Q3...](https://s23.q4cdn.com/407969754/files/doc_financials/2019/Q3/Quarterly- Earnings-Report-Q32019.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER21> I'd love to hear some smart people opinions on this idea:

"Uber doesn't need to be profitable, they just need to survive until their autonomous cars are deployed"

<comment><USER22> IMHO, autonomous cars actually breaks Uber's model. It changes it from taking a % off the top of a market to a capital and maintenance intensive business. Only seems to work if they end up with some sort of franchise model. Sort of like how Coke has a bunch of distributors.

<comment><USER9> That's about right. Running a fleet of autonomous vehicles is an expensive proposition, and probably will be for years after they start working. Waymo outsources some of that to Avis Rent-A-Car, which already has garages, maintenance facilities, parking lots, car washes, etc.

It's quite possible that when automomous vehicle operations start working, the big players will be car rental companies. It's a natural extension to their business.

<comment><USER23> I have a hard time believing that anyone on HN legitimately things that companies like Hertz and Avis will be able to become efficient in the ridesharing market before one of the two TNCs become efficient in the fleet management market (which is a subset of the rental car market that overlaps with TNCs once they choose to have their own fleet.

One set of businesses here has modern engineering practices and the other set are dinosaurs. Furthermore, rental companies have more employees dedicated to sales than to fleet management and their entire current customer base is rental car consumers. They literally need to redirect money to R&D long term where that R&D serves no benefit to their current customer base. Wall Street will punish the stock of rental car companies short term for spending R&D on becoming ridesharing businesses that serve a customer they don't yet even have mindshare with. With the TNCs however, wall street won't see any problem with them building out their own fleet. The only condition where wall street looks down on the idea of own fleet management is if they believe a franchise model with third party fleet managers make sense. Either way the TNCs own the relationship with the customer and therefore has all the power.

<comment><USER24> I would not be so sure. Avis, in particular, is actively pushing for a flow where you book online, use "secret" promo code to get full insurance for basically zero, pick up car directly on parking lot with keys inside, and drive away. It takes literally 5 minutes and a single employee to check your driving license and contract. Hertz is trying to do same, though less effectively. Their websites and apps are still horrible, and it's perplexing why, but the cost of building decent apps will be immaterial compared to the cost of the vehicles, and from that, building actual on-demand short-term rental network does not seem so unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If they hadn't gotten into food delivery, freight, scooters, etc. they'd be profitable by now.

<comment><USER26> Only if you take their made up, non GAAP, financial measurement of "adjusted EBITDA" seriously. This is no better than WeWork's "community adjusted EBITDA" and we see how that worked out.

 _Adjusted EBITDA. We define Adjusted EBITDA as net income (loss), excluding (i) income (loss) from discontinued operations, net of income taxes, (ii) net income (loss) attributable to non-controlling interests, net of tax, (iii) provision for (benefit from) income taxes, (iv) income (loss) from equity method investment, net of tax, (v) interest expense, (vi) other income (expense), net, (vii) depreciation and amortization, (viii) stock-based compensation expense, (ix) certain legal, tax, and regulatory reserve changes and settlements, (x) asset impairment /loss on sale of assets, (xi) acquisition and financing related expenses, (xii) restructuring charges and (xiii) other items not indicative of our ongoing operating performance._

<comment><USER25> Well ok first, there's a world of difference between the reasonably widespread practice of adjusted EBITDA and inventing your definition that does not account for the costs of marketing or leases.

But I'm really not even commenting on these results precisely. They would have been in an entirely different position without all the distractions. Uber's ride business now makes a billion dollars a month in revenue. That's after paying drivers. If they had been laser-focused on making the ride business work, they could have grown a much lower-overhead business. They could have taken the company public years ago. An earlier IPO would have meant those huge stock-based compensation packages would be off the books by now. A just-get- me-a-car Uber would have been GAAP profitable by now.

<comment><USER27> EBITDA is a wipespread (though still somewhat sketchy) practice. "Adjusted EBITDA" is just making up fairy-tale numbers.

<comment><USER26> I didn't realize the EBiTDA wasn't GAAP. But you are absolutely right.

[https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/ebitda.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/ebitda.asp)

<comment><USER25> There are legitimate reasons to report non-GAAP numbers next to the required GAAP numbers. When it was required to recognize revenue phone sales over 2 years, Apple included non-GAAP numbers to give investors a better sense of how sales were actually growing, and reported it as "Adjusted Sales" and "Adjusted Net Income." These were completely made up terms, but they did give a vastly more accurate image of where the company was going than the GAAP numbers did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Warren Buffett famously said: "When you read EBITDA, you should think BULLSHIT". The only reliable metrics are EBIT (if you precisely know the debt and tax situation of the company, which is usually laid open in the reports), and NET PROFIT.

Remember just 1 month ago, when WeWork tried to FRAUD everyone with their "we invented our own EBITDA"-metric, which they called 'EBIT adjusted for consciousness, because we sell consciousness, so we factor in the amount of consciousness we generate per square mile!!!!' ?

<comment><USER29> What the frick is consciousness?

<comment><USER30> That's not an actual quote, FYI. They peddled something called "community- adjusted EBITDA."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> if uber, wasn't doing business on an uber scale. then maybe, instead of lighting money, they would be printing money. correct ideas, but wrong execution. but alas, a holoi polloi like me will enjoy the VC subsidized rides

<comment><USER17> Another user, gok, has a point that if they were just doing ride sharing, they could possibly be break even or profitable. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21450647](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21450647)</comment></comment>